An older man with salt and pepper hair, a collared white shirt and blue slacks sat across from me at the metal table that I was siting at. He reached into the pocket on the jacket that was draped over his chair and pulled out a dark handkerchief. He had begun to perspire under the bright light that was hanging above the table inside of the Springfield interrogation room with the two-way mirror, and he used the handkerchief to dab away the beads of sweat that slowly arose from the pours on his forehead.
“I’m not going to ask you again—who else did you share this information with?”
“And I asked to speak with a lawyer.”
“You’re in a lot more trouble than any lawyer can dig you out of,” the rogue police captain dabbed his forehead again with the handkerchief. “The guy you were running with has a hell of a rap sheet, a warrant out for his arrest, and not a bone strong enough in his body to resist throwing you under the bus.”
I could see it in their eyes when they caught me running from the felon’s place. The police officers in on the embezzlement scam were desperate and needed to squander any word about their murders and other atrocities that happened in Springfield. I, the young journalist that had escaped their reach for so long, was the last piece in their twisted puzzle toward practically owning the city and then going into early retirement.
“Am I under arrest?” I asked with a blank stare.
The captain got up from his seat and left the room. I sat alone for several minutes until two men in cheap suits came in to escort me out. I looked around at the halls of the police station and noticed that they were taking me towards the back of the building.
I tried to open my mouth to scream, but all I could let out was a shaky whimper. “Where are you taking me?” I asked very concerned. They had killed so many before me and had enough people in on their scheme that the bodies could conveniently disappear. I knew it was the end for me, but what they couldn’t confirm is that I drove to Washington not hide, but to tell my story.
The officers had taken me out into an alley and shoved me into a car waiting to make me vanish for good. In return, I had passed off evidence of money laundering and embezzlement to a contact of a higher authority in Washington, and offered to wear a small wire that fed the last sounds of my known existence to a federal office. The story would go out about the fraud, and a lot of people would go to jail, but few would know about the people who died trying to share the story. The greatest story never told, about the ones who really brought the tale to light, would die somewhere after the alley, and would be laid to rest in a single file inside of a folder.
Jazzed About Stuff 